


Deep Cover

by NotQuiteHydePark



Category: New Mutants, X-Force (Comics), X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Character Death Fix, Fix-It, Gen, Psychic Bond, Wolf Pack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-02
Updated: 2019-05-02
Packaged: 2020-02-16 08:27:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18687802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NotQuiteHydePark/pseuds/NotQuiteHydePark
Summary: Fix-it fic for Uncanny X-Men 17 (2019). If Rahne's not dead-- and she can't be-- why the big funeral?





	Deep Cover

The only people left in Harry’s Hideaway after the funeral are Dani, Illyana and Scott. Logan’s going to walk in about fifteen minutes from now; Dani already knows where he is—some kind of residual Valkyrie powers, maybe, since Logan’s been so bound up with death, or maybe just some vague not-quite-magic sense of what’s coming. 

For now, though, the place feels seriously deserted. Harry’s in the basement. There’s no barkeep. Empty tumblers shine on the bartop in front of Magik and Scott; Dani, her feather earrings dangling, sips ginger ale.

“I wish I felt less comfortable in this dress,” Illyana says, fingering the black bow at the neck. “I think Victorian mourning suits me.”

“Mourning,” Scott says. “I wish we didn’t have to do so damn much of it. At least it means we know how to pretend.”

“Is it safe to talk?” Dani asks.

“It is now,” Illyana says, weaving green fire through a pair of pentagrams she makes with her hands. Every time she visits Greenwich Village she comes back with a few new spells. “No one outside this room can hear or detect anything anybody says in this room for the next ten minutes. Longer than that and the spell could burn down the bar.”

“Thank you,” Scott says. His expression doesn’t change, but Dani’s does; from a grim frown, she practically melts into a get-to-work face, a face that shows both concentration and relief.

“Where is she? Can you track her?” Illyana says. “It’s not like we can.”

“Outside Rochester, New York, headed west through the woods,” Dani says. “She must have hitched a ride on a truck. She’s definitely healthy, though. I wish we didn’t have to pull this off.”

“It might not be for long,” Illyana says. “But when the world gives you an opportunity to bring down evil, you take it.” Illyana should know.

“Some opportunity,” Scott says. He’s eating, or drinking, what must be a black bean soup. Depressed Scott prefers soup. Faux-depressed, somewhat-worried Scott also likes soup. Illyana prefers vodka tonics. “But we had to take it.”

“These—what are we calling them now, Low Evolutionaries?—the Low Evolutionaries are probably based in Wisconsin, from what we know. Rahne just has to get to Wisconsin, use what she learns from the regular wolves and the forest trails out there, infiltrate their HQ, and report. We won’t have to keep this awful charade up forever. Just for a week or ten days, I suspect.” Dani plays with the metal straw in her ginger ale, extracts and sucks on the lime.

“A week is a long time,” Illyana says. “But we do what we must. There’s absolutely nobody else we know who could have tracked down these conspirators without getting noticed and scaring them away—and we need to take them out. I know we had a plan for Rahne to pretend to leave and live a normal life and then disappear later, but this is better: time matters. We’ll get to them faster this time.” Then she realizes how she sounds to Dani, who had to pretend to feel Rahne die in real time, in front of their friends.

Illyana reaches out and puts a hand, very unsteadily, on Dani’s shoulder. Her denim jacket feels cold. Dani shudders. “I know it was your idea. But it must have taken so much out of you.”

“My brother,” Scott says. “My eminently mind-controllable brother.” That was why the three of them had to pretend that Rahne was dead, not just to the world, but to all the remaining X-Men: if Magik was reading the spellsigns correctly, Alex Summers had become, without knowing it, the magickal eyes and ears of the Low Evolutionary conspiracy, the evolved nonhuman mammals who had escaped in a horde from Wundagore and were building weapons to bring humanity down. Weapons and spellwork, along with claws and hooves. They looked like a bad Adult Swim show, all cartoony snouts and tail-whips, but they would be a formidable collective foe. Unless they could be brought down, fast, from the inside.

But to do that, there had to be an animal-form or half-animal mutant who could fit into their crowd for a day or more. Rahne had been planning to fade away into normalcy and then turn up as Anonymous Talking Half-Wolf, another escapee from Wundagore. But then it would have taken months, dangerous months, for her to get off the magical radar; months for the Low Evolutionaries to consolidate, plan, build a citadel.

When the street harassers attacked her, she used her telepathic bond with Dani to propose another way. If she could pretend to die, her death might just help police catch catch these baseline humans, who surely already deserved to be (at the least) in prison for (at the least) aggravated assault. And she could get into deep cover in half-wolf form much sooner if she was assumed to be dead. Maybe, grotesque as it was, that was the best way.

“It’s going to hurt,” Dani had said over their telepathic bond, though not quite in words (Dani and Rahne didn’t exactly use words). “Pretending to die will hurt you, pretending you’re dead will hurt me, and believing you’re dead will hurt Xi’an and Illyana and Sam and—“

“You can tell them,” Rahne had told Dani (or rather felt at her, without using words). “But tell them one by one. Even if you have to wait till after the funeral.” Then the murderous boys commenced their beatdown, and Rahne—hard to hurt as she was—had to pretend to cower, had pretend to insist she was normal, had to pretend, for a little while, to be dead.

The only X-Men who absolutely had to go on believing that Rahne was dead, whatever it took, were Alex, the Jamies, and… Logan. Alex had that spell still at work around him... and his old psychic bond with Rahne made it especially important that he not know. The Jamies had less than no psychic shielding at this point. ("When we pretend that we're dead," Dani remembered the song, "they can't hear a word we said." When and only when.) As for Logan, whatever was in Logan’s mind was something the Low Evolutionaries could simply access. It had something to do with Logan’s resurrection, and something to do with the Weapon X program decades ago, and nobody understood it entirely, but Illyana was sure—grimly sure, very practically sure—that Logan had to go on thinking Wolfsbane was gone from this world, until she completed her mission.

At least Dani and Scott and Illyana knew the truth. And bad as that truth was—how much worse would it be if they lost their friend for real? How much worse, and how implausible, to her closest friends, Dani mused. Rahne struggled with self-hate, but not to that degree. Not recently. She knew she had friends who believed in her, in her wolf form and as that red-haired, only-recently-still-a-girl. She wasn’t going to let them go.

Rahne is alive, in deep cover, on a mission that could take a week, or much longer than that. She’ll report back when she can. Dani knows where she is at all times, and keeps watch over her. The other first New Mutants, the ones who were close enough to Rahne, will learn the truth when they can.

Scott watches Illyana eat the last buffalo wings. She looks like she has fangs, he thought. Fangs she would only use in a righteous cause. One thing about Cyclops and Magik: they can keep secrets. Scott hopes they won’t have to keep this one for long.

**Author's Note:**

> If you don't know and want to know why Uncanny X-Men 17 is super problematic and is the kind of story that IMHO cries out for fix-it fit, here's a good explanation: https://www.comicsbeat.com/uncanny-x-men-17-trans-panic-murder/ Note that the issue's writer has publicly indicated that he's aware of the problems and is trying to listen and learn.


End file.
